Unlike Groucho Marx, I am happy to join any club that will have me as a member, so I was honoured to be invited to be in the "Great Day" photo. The idea was to take a group photograph of people who are making a significant contribution to contemporary British literature and who are of Caribbean, African or Asian descent. The inspiration came from "A Great Day in Harlem", the famous photograph of American jazz musicians taken in New York in 1958 by Art Kane for Esquire magazine.

Kane asked the musicians to assemble outside a brownstone house in Harlem at 10am one Sunday morning. Most jazz musicians were used to sleeping in late and, it was said, didn't know there were two 10 o'clocks in a day, but, amazingly, 59 turned up. Among them were Dizzy Gillespie, Theolonius Monk, Count Basie - and the resulting picture has become a who's who of the great jazz musicians of the time.

This new "Great Day" photo was the idea of Melanie Abrahams who set up Renaissance One, an agency that represents international artists and writers. She said, "I had wanted to create a 'happening' that celebrated and showcased writers who had made an impact. Staging a photo shoot seemed a simple, yet striking, way of bringing it about."

Renaissance One - in partnership with Decibel, the Arts Council programme which promotes diversity in the arts, and the British Library - organised the event. A list of 80 names was produced and all of them were invited to come. Inevitably, some could not make it; people had other commitments or were on holiday; one was getting married. But in the end 50 came, from all around the country; some even flew in from other parts of the world. Others, like myself, got on a bus to be there.

We assembled at the British Library. Although writers tend to be more solitary than jazz musicians, it was obvious that many people knew each other from the literary circuit or just from reading each other's work. For me the chance to eat, drink and chat with a roomful of novelists, poets, playwrights, journalists and literary "movers and shakers", gave me a feeling of connectedness that I don't often have as I sit alone in front of my computer.

The playwright Roy Williams came, he said, because "hopefully, it will inspire the next generation who are in school thinking 'can I do this, can I be a novelist, can I be a playwright?' " Poet and novelist Jackie Kay said, "There are a lot of black writers in this country but, sadly, people only seem to know two or three. This sort of thing makes a big visual statement." "Not to be here today would be crazy," was how the writer Fred D'Aguiar saw it.

To be in the Harlem photo you had to be a member of the "jazz club", so although most of the people who gathered on the Harlem sidewalk were African Americans there were plenty of white musicians there as well. Our club was a little more complicated because as well as being involved in British literature we were all of Caribbean, African or Asian descent.

Being grouped in this way can be a sensitive issue with people who have often had to fight being trapped by unwelcome stereotypes. Would there be anyone who didn't want to be defined by ethnic origin? According to the organiser no one declined to come for that reason. Even those who could not make it wished the project well. The truth is that however temporary, shifting or partial our club may be, right at this moment it seemed worth recording - celebrating even.

Britain is finally beginning to gather up its more distant voices and listen to the rich stories that they have to tell; stories that are as central to the history of Britain and British literature as anything that we are more familiar with. John Updike said recently, "With Empire coming back to Britain, you have lots of different kinds of voices", or as Salman Rushdie famously put it, "The Empire writes back".

These writers believe that the work coming from what has often been called "the margins" - from the immigrants, their children and their children's children - is invigorating British writing with a new vitality born out of these different perspectives and ways of viewing the world.

Looking at the writers in the picture you can see how this is the case. There is Lynton Kwesi Johnson, widely regarded as the father of dub poetry; Malorie Blackman, the highly successful children's author whose novel Noughts and Crosses was one of the books on the BBC's The Big Read Top 100 list; Ben Okri, who won the Booker Prize for his novel The Famished Road; Romesh Gunesekera, who was short-listed for the same prize with his novel Reef; Gary Younge and Maya Jaggi are well known for their thoughtful, intelligent journalism.

Many of the faces may not be familiar but their owners work behind the scenes. David Tse is a playwright and artistic director of Yellow Earth, an international touring company. Margaret Busby was Britain's first and youngest black woman book publisher when she co-founded Allison and Busby. I could go on. I should - you'd be amazed what an impact the people in this photo have had on British literature.

We used to be thought of as marginal voices but look at what has happened in publishing over the 10 years that I have been a writer. At first I found it hard to find a publisher; not only was I from a minority but publishers felt my novels would only appeal to minority tastes. However, today some of the bestselling books in this country have come from authors who would once have been seen as "minority interest" and have now become publishing gold.

It is Britain that gains. Where else in the world would this particular grouping of writers have any meaning? "Britain did this to us," is how Gary Younge put it. "Before we came here our parents were from all over the Empire. But being in Britain gave us all a common identity." From where I stand it's difficult to see anything good about the British Empire and its aftermath, but this photograph, with all its shades of ethnicity, does represent one positive legacy. A new group of people who are, in one way or another, part of Britain but who bring with them experience and creativity from many different parts of the world.

The Harlem picture was largely forgotten until a few years ago when a documentary uncovered the photograph as a unique icon of a golden age of jazz. Who knows what this "Great Day in London" picture will mean to people in the future? I believe that it will prove to be a fascinating snapshot of a truly dynamic force in British literature - and, of course, a record of a great day.